


Padme's Boy

by generalkenobi715



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23824720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/generalkenobi715/pseuds/generalkenobi715
Summary: A moment between a young Luke and Obi-wan on Tatooine with the assumption that Obi-wan had a little more of a hand in raising him.  As you can probably tell, I am obsessed with this specific time gap and you will never be able to convince me that they didn't have some kind of relationship when Luke was little. I am waiting for the Kenobi show VERY patiently :)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Padme's Boy

“Uncle Ben?”  
“Hmm?”  
“What was my mom like?”

Obi-wan opened his eyes to Luke’s hunched silhouette, wrapped tightly in his old cloak. He was looking into the fire, eyes fixed on the flames as if in a trance. There was no thought of the ground below, or the stars above, or the sparks dancing before the eyes that were so jarringly like his father’s. This was a boy trapped deep in thought.

Obi-wan had known this day would come.

And he knew he wouldn’t be ready.

“Why do you ask?”

Luke’s eyes didn’t move. There was something trapped there, something Obi-wan hadn’t seen before. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to.

It was a longing not meant to be felt by one so young.

The boy’s next words were careful. “You’ve told me about my father.”

Obi-wan took a breath, and sat up against the base of the tree where he’d been resting. He knew there’d come a day when Luke would need to know the truth about Anakin. About...Vader. He preferred not to think about that either. “Yes.”

Luke continued, “you’ve told me he was brave, and strong. A good Jedi.”

Obi-wan looked at the ground. ‘Good’ was putting it lightly.  
“He was one of the greatest men I ever knew.”

Luke was silent for a moment. “But what about my mom?”

The words to answer that question came to Obi-wan no more easily than the first time Luke had asked. He could only exhale, his brow furrowing.

“I did have a mom.”

Obi-wan almost chuckled. “Yes, Luke, you had a mother.”

Luke’s eyes darted up from where his gaze had been fixed, looking for Obi-wan to fill the silence that followed. He often forgot that though he shared Anakin’s bright blues, the piercing intensity of his father’s gaze seemed nowhere to be found. Luke’s eyes were soft, gentle, pensive. Kinder than any he’d ever seen.

They were Padme’s eyes.   
The pain in his chest that so often haunted him returned.

“Your mother... was a senator—“

Luke’s nose crinkled. “For the Empire?!”

This time, Obi-wan did laugh. “No Luke, not for the Empire. For the Republic.”

“Oh.”

He looked back at Luke, the boy made in his father’s image, and was reminded, as he so often was, that he had his mother’s heart.  
Suddenly, the words Obi-wan needed were there.

“Come here, Luke.”

Nearly tripping over the borrowed cloak made for a much larger man, Luke scrambled up from his spot across the fire and took his place on Obi-wan’s lap. The boy would be too big for it soon, and his heart ached at the thought.

“Your mom,” he began, “was the smartest woman in the galaxy.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What else could she do?”

“She was a fighter, and a good one at that. She saved your father and I more times than I’d care to say.”

“She saved the Jedi?”

“She did. She was incredible. She was elected Queen when she was only a bit older than you.”

“Wow..” Luke breathed, yawning the word as he rested his blonde head on Obi-wan’s shoulder.

“But more importantly, your mother was a good person. She commanded a room, yet left every person in it feeling more valued than before she walked in.”

Obi-wan looked down, surprised to see Luke’s eyes still open, fixed on his every word.  
“She was beautiful. Your father saw it from the day he met her.”

“You knew him then?”

“I did.” A lump rose in his throat, but he continued.

“Your mother”, he said, “was as forgiving as she was powerful, and as gracious as she was sharp. She loved with every ounce of her soul, and she loved your father very much.”

“And me?”

Obi-wan barely choked back a sob, instead masking it with a laugh. “Yes, Luke, I know she loved you very much. So did your father.”

Luke smiled, that boyish grin that set off an ache of familiarity in his chest. Then his gaze fell again, and the longing Obi-wan had seen before returned. His hands gripped Obi-wan’s tunic, searching for the greatest comfort he knew.  
“I wish they were still here.”

Obi-wan pulled Luke closer, wrapping his arms around him tightly. Almost as if he was afraid of letting go. As if he was afraid to let the boy see how devastated he was.

“I wish they were too”.

Luke yawned again, his eyes returning to the fire. “Tell me more. About my mom.”

Obi-wan ran his fingers through the boy’s hair, leaning his head against the tree behind him as he mustered up the last few words. Words to do Padme justice, to describe the woman she had been to her son.

“Your mother was warm, and loving, and unconditional. She was light personified, beautiful in every regard. She was proud, and strong, but one of the gentlest souls I’ve ever known. Your mother,” Obi-wan said over the tears that welled to his eyes, “was very much like you.”

He stopped. The words had run out.

He looked down to see Luke sound asleep, still wrapped in Obi-wan’s cloak, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Obi-wan remembered nights like this, so many years ago, when he had watched Anakin sleep in the light of a fire. The two of them against the world. Back then, he had never gotten close. He had comforted from afar, offering words of wisdom after his nightmares, and watched from across the site to make sure his Padawan fell back asleep.

Now, he couldn’t imagine letting the boy from his arms. It was in moments like this that reality seemed far too tangible. From the shade of his hair, to the curve of his brow, to the soft way he spoke, to the brightness of his laugh, Luke gave Obi-wan no shortage of reminders as to who he was. He was, in every possible way, Anakin and Padme’s son. With his sister lightyears away, this sweet boy was all that remained - all that Obi-wan had left of the ones he had loved most.

It was in moments like this that Obi-wan remembered, and regret found its way in through the cracked walls of his heart. He remembered his brother, his best friend, the boy he had sworn to protect. Anakin had still been a boy when Luke was born - there was no denying that. He had been a boy, facing down circumstances no man can ever possibly prepare for. The world on his shoulders.

If only Obi-wan had been there to shoulder some of the weight. Perhaps Anakin’s children would have a father.

He saw Anakin in Luke during the hurried moments - the treks across the desert, the unbridled enthusiasm that lit up his face the day a new astromech came through the market. His love for the tales of the Jedi, and perhaps his attachment to Obi-wan. The way his gaze always found the skyline, eyes fixed on the horizon. In that regard, he was a Skywalker, through and through.

It was in the quiet moments, however, that he saw Padme. It was in the way he spoke, his sensitivity to others’ emotions. In his lighthearted humor and gentle mannerisms. In his brilliant smile, in his forgiving heart. In his kind eyes, and his loving soul.

It was in moments like these that Obi-wan looked down and saw Padme’s boy — Padme, the woman who had loved Anakin with everything she had, and who loved her children enough to believe in him until the very end, imploring Obi-wan to do the same.   
She was light and love, taken far too soon.

It was in moments like these that he remembered standing where Anakin should have been, holding Luke in one arm, his other hand clasped in Padme’s as she gave everything she had left to her children. He was there, holding her son as she gave him the name that embodied her dying hopes.   
Luke. “The light giving.”   
He remembered begging her to stay with them, his heart breaking for the crying children made orphans far too soon. But he was not who she needed by her side.   
Obi-wan had failed Anakin, but they had both failed Padme.

It was a memory that never failed to break him. And it was the moment he had decided to never let her boy go.

Looking down on Luke, the living embodiment of Anakin’s light and Padme’s love, Obi-wan’s everything, he had never been able to think of him the way he knew the others did: as a mistake, an unfortunate circumstance. Collateral damage of a great tragedy.   
No.   
Luke and Leia were never the mistake.

The mistake was his, for allowing their parents’ love for each other and for their children to drive them into oblivion.

He pulled the sleeping boy ever tighter, pressing his face into the messy hair. It was in moments like these that he was glad that Luke was asleep, as he let the tears roll, a few sobs escaping his throat in the dead of night. They came less often, now, than they had before. But it was in moments like this, after only being able to describe the love he knew Luke deserved to feel firsthand, the parents he so longed to know, that his training failed him. The memories rushed in, and his failure stung as fresh as that day six years before. 

It stung now, however, for a different reason than it had in those dark, early days of the Empire. Those days he had slept alone, trapped with only his thoughts and the pain he thought would never subside. The hole left by the people he truly loved. 

Now, it stung for the boy that wore his cloak and nestled so trustingly in his arms. The boy that had helped to fill, if only in part, that gaping canyon left by his parents’ deaths. Tears pricked at his eyes not only for his own loss, but for that of the boy who found safety in the embrace of Obi-wan Kenobi instead of his mother and father. He wept for the life that had been ripped away from the boy he had come to love as fiercely as he had loved Anakin and Padme. He wept for the belonging Luke would always seek, for the longing he saw in those beautiful eyes. He wept for all Luke had lost at so young, but most of all, he wept for the fearless, loving heart that had grown in spite of it all. Padme’s heart.

Obi-wan only hoped to give her son a fraction of the love which would do her justice, yet through the tears and the pain, he smiled in knowing that it would likely be Luke to give that love to him.

After all, he was so very much like her.


End file.
